8,236 days

On the 24th April 2002, in the 58th minute of Ipswich’s home match with Middlesbrough, loping Icelander Hermann Hreidarsson flicked on Tottenham academy graduate Jamie Clapham’s corner. Lurking between the posts, the classic poacher, Darren Bent, 18 years old.  Always ready to pounce, he kneed the ball the final 4 yards over the line for the first of his 193 career goals.

Bent’s first senior strike gave Ipswich our last Premier League win. Though at the time they filled me with foolhardy belief, the three points gained were welcome but insufficient. Ipswich remained two points behind Sunderland in 17th with only defeats to Manchester United and Liverpool still to come. Between that win and our next, 8,236 days, nine Ipswich managers and 7 British prime ministers passed. Liam Delap was born and his father played a further 230 Premier League games. Gareth Southgate, who missed a late chance for Middlesbrough that day, retired and led England to three international tournament near misses. Myspace came and went. I graduated, emigrated, re-emigrated, changed profession, moved house 9 times. The average cost of a pint went from £2.10 to £4.70.

It was worth the wait. Whilst we fought our way to no wins and five points in ten games there was a lot of discussion about whether the Premier League might just be no fun. But there can be joy (alongside all the other emotions too) in fighting a battle in which you know you’re overmatched. Just wait, I thought, because beating someone good is going to hit like ecstasy. After the referee’s final whistle blew, I floated out of the Spaceship-cum-shopping-centre that is the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium just a little vibrating ball of endorphins, LIAM DELAP OLÉ OLÉ OLÉ drumming through me like the bass in a warehouse rave.

I’m sure the buzz would have been there regardless of the performance. Ten games and more than three months is a lot of build-up and even an obviously undeserved smash and grab would have still felt special.

This wasn’t that. Ipswich’s triumph over Tottenham begged very few questions. Six years ago we posted our first win in our twelfth match, an absolute robbery by a team that was getting worse not better, where the three points were the only positive. A day where every shot went in and the opposition were criminally profligate. Not on Sunday. We even contrived to miss our early chances, to the point that I started worrying about it. We made more clear openings than our illustrious opponents and whilst Aro Muric had a very good game, no miracles were required of him. After Everton I had rather resigned myself to limping into the third international break and hoping things might pick up as injured players returned. Instead we’ve had three weeks of improvement, with both result and quality of play against Tottenham feeling very replicable.

Afterwards much media attention naturally rested on Tottenham’s inconsistency, referencing “Spursiness” as well as a more recent coinage: “Dr. Tottenham”, able to revive any ailing patient. Yet Spurs’ home record against bottom half sides under Ange Postecoglou offers little support to such notions. They won nine out of ten such fixtures last season and three out of three this time out. Perhaps this one was more down to Dr. McKenna.

Of course, I must remind myself that seeing a solitary migratory bird doesn’t necessarily mean the solstice is imminent. Still, my confidence grows that we can move beyond the inconsistency and imbalance that marked many of our October fixtures.

Some of our recent improvement has been about taking comfort in old hands. Neither started this one, but I wrote previously of my joy in seeing Conor Chaplin and George Hirst leading from the front against Brentford. Over the past three games Cameron Burgess had gone from steady(ish) but clearly stretched to composed and comfortable. Omari Hutchinson’s contribution was massive here and he was deservedly singled out for praise on MOTD2. The return of Axel Tuanzebe ahead of schedule was manna from heaven, we conceded as many goals in the four matches he missed as we did in the seven he’s played in, despite him playing in most of our hardest fixtures. McKenna was quick to reference the contributions of longer standing players in his post-match interview.

I am always primed to give those boys their flowers, but Sunday afternoon I started learning to love more of the new acquisitions. The charms of the juggernaut Liam Delap had won us all over weeks ago and are too obvious for me to bother detailing them here, so I’ll press on with talking about the rest.

What do you need against the most physically relentless pressing team in the league? A centre midfielder with the strength and technique to wriggle through as many aggressive pressers as you can throw at him. Tottenham hunted and harried, but time and again Jens Cajuste tunnelled his way out (with considerable elegance) to stretch his legs in open spaces. Between him, Morsy and Phillips (plus Luongo and Taylor) we look well set for the long winter.

Ben Johnson had already thrown off any remaining rust against Leicester and he was equally superb here playing in the right-wing back role. The feeling you had earlier in the season that he was tactically a poor fit for our system has dissipated as the McKenna patterning begins to settle. He managed to play a key role in both goals, setting the ball back for Cajuste to cross for the first and finally bringing some calm to a chaotic passage of play in our own third with a glorious first touch to drag Leif Davis’ hurried clearance out of the air.

At centre back I’m finally ready to warm up to Dara O’Shea, despite still being president of the Official Luke Woolfenden Fan Club. A few weeks ago I was mithering about the club perhaps prioritising athleticism at the expense of game understanding in this bit of recruitment, but O’Shea really was astonishingly good in this one. Two moments in quick succession stood out. Four minutes left and James Maddison found a fast straight ball through to Son Heung-min in space down the left. Plenty of green grass to gallop into and O’Shea was furiously backpedalling. Son shifted the ball right and O’Shea read it wonderfully, perfectly timing a jab tackle with his left foot to take the ball. Clean. Forty seconds later and Yves Bissouma found another progressive pass, this time to Timo Werner. Werner managed to take Tuanzebe on the dribble, but O’Shea read the situation, accelerating to take every inch of the space the wide man wanted to claim. By the time the Stuttgarter looked up all his options were gone and O’Shea’s tackle was simple.   

I found new appreciation for all of them during the 90 minutes in North London. However, the new boy really winning the race to this middle-aged man’s heart is Samuel Joseph Szmodics. I said last season that sometimes the best value signings are to be found when you set aside “player trading” and just go out and get an older player who will do the job. What would a 20-year-old with Szmodics’ goalscoring record last season cost you? Certainly a lot more than £8m.  

Szmodics is fleet of foot and quick in his thinking. He works relentlessly. He’s the kind of spiky wind-up merchant who gets under the skin of the opposition. I saw a Spurs fan on social media post pre-kick-off that he didn’t mind if any Ipswich player scored “apart from that little c*** Szmodics”. When on Earth did ex-Colchester, Peterborough and Blackburn forward Sammie Szmodics have time to irritate Spurs fans? I suppose some players just have that delightful ability to rattle cages.

Above all, even when his team-mates have seemed frayed and frenetic, he’s looked nerveless. He’s spent his entire career in the EFL but doesn’t look fazed by the grandeur of his new surroundings, perhaps because, as he rather charmingly told Town TV recently, playing for Colchester United was all he wanted to achieve in football. All of this is just a well-earned bonus. He’s not over-thinking things, he’s just taking the opportunities that come his way and as a result he’s in the top 15 per cent of wingers and attacking midfielders for shot attempts (top 2% for goals scored!), despite being in the bottom 5 per cent for touches of the football.

Making the most of scraps. For our first, he beat a cluster of white shirts to a dropping loose ball then executed a perfect overhead kick. It was all desire, self-belief, improvisation and skill. For our second, he looked for all the world like he’d tweaked his groin shortly beforehand. Maybe the little shithouse was just kidding his marker into switching off because he was suddenly sprinting past Cristian Romero on the underlap and flashing the ball across for Delap. Clinical, combative, clever. He’s everything you want in a relegation scrap.

After a few weeks wondering whether we’d spent a fortune to stand still, we’re starting to see so much of it pay off. Delap and Greaves looked serious assets straightaway, but now Muric, Johnson, O’Shea, Cajuste, Hutchinson and Szmodics all look increasingly canny investments. At one point I worried I might never warm to the new boys, but now I’m counting the days until I can watch them all again.  

Sammie Szmodics v Tottenham Hotspur

Minutes played 71

Goals 1

Shots 2

Accurate passes 10/16 (63%)

Expected goals 0.43

Expected goals on target 1.41

Shot accuracy 2/2 (100%)

Big chances missed 1

Touches 32

Touches in opposition box 5

Passes into final third 1

Accurate crosses 0/2 (0%)

Dispossessed 2

Tackles won 2/2 (100%)

Clearances 1

Dribbled past 1

Duels won 3

Duels lost 4